Branding, Blocks, and Big Moves in the WooCommerce Ecosystem

Brian:
I have our friends from Do the Woo, whom many of you might already be familiar with: Courtney and Jonathan. Let me introduce our two guests for those of you who are not already familiar with Do the Woo and these two amazing hosts. Do the Woo is the podcast for anyone who is interested, even in the slightest regard. There are so many shows, so many episodes, so many hosts that I’m confident if you are even remotely interested in e-commerce and WooCommerce specifically, you’re going to find something you like there, which is why I’ve been excited to partner with Do the Woo for many years running now. We get to host these crossover episodes where I get to be the guest at my own event and hear what our hosts have to think. The hosts we are joined with right now are Courtney Robertson and Jonathan Wold.

Courtney is an open source advocate at GoDaddy, and she’s been helping small businesses enhance their online presence with WordPress since 2004. So woohoo, she didn’t get in exactly on the ground floor, but she got here as quickly as she could—pretty close. And then Jonathan is the co-founder of Guildenberg, and he’s been dedicated to the WordPress community for the last 17 years, just as long as me, and this part’s beautiful: Jonathan considers WordPress and our full ecosystem here as sort of the operating system for the open web, and I don’t think I could agree with a sentiment more than that one. So Courtney, Jonathan, thank you so much for joining us today and for being here. I’m going to turn it over to you to actually get this started properly and walk us through all the things we’re going to be talking about for the next 40 minutes or so.

Jonathan:
Thank you, Brian.

Courtney:
Thank you. So, what was your highlight so far today? What do you think was the most interesting thing, Jonathan, that…

Jonathan:
…Came out? Well, first off, Courtney, apparently I’m now rocking a legacy WooCommerce swag.

Courtney:
For those that aren’t able to see, can you describe why you’re wearing a… what’s the legacy swag?

Jonathan:
I’m wearing my Do the Woo shirt, which is actually just the WooCommerce shirt that I wear when I do episodes of Do the Woo. I’ve always liked it. Automattic has always done a good job with swag, and the Woo shirt was no exception. Today, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it is now a legacy logo design that I’ve got, and we’ve got a new WooCommerce logo. What did you think of it, Courtney?

Courtney:
I like that it is bold. I think that it maybe looks a little bit more grown up, dare I say. Previously, for those that are unfamiliar, if you’re listening to this episode, I’m not so sure that you would be unfamiliar, but the old Woo logo was kind of like a chat bubble that says “Woo” in it, often with purple and white as the branding colors. We see different shades of purple coming in, and we see that the W sometimes will have the OO beside it and sometimes will animate into wheels, as if under a shopping cart. I enjoy the refresh. I have concerns about animated GIFs in the WordPress plugin directory to begin with. Having it animate can be cool for video effects if you’re using it in a video, but envisioning how that’s going to look as a thumbnail in the plugin directory doesn’t solve my wish for getting rid of animated GIFs there. Otherwise, rave reviews.

Jonathan:
I’ve come to appreciate just how much can become involved with a logo change. It’s a big deal, right? Back when I worked at WooCommerce a couple of years ago, they were talking about it then, so it’s fun to see it finally come to fruition. I’m also someone who generally likes change, so I like it just objectively. It’s also going to be interesting. I feel some nostalgia already for the old logo we’ve had for such a long time. I felt an affinity for it because the brand has been around for so long. I think it’s a great change. I’m excited to see how they roll it out. I like the flexibility that the two wheels provide—it’s got some interesting things you can play with out of that. So, congratulations to the WooCommerce team. There was a lot more that was covered.

Courtney:
Sure was.

Jonathan:
What stood out to you, Courtney?

Courtney:
I really enjoyed the state of Woo address. On the whole, it felt to me like a bit of a product roadmap of where we could be going. The main thing that really stands out to me is how much the team, those primarily working on it, are really leaning into getting it up to speed with modern WordPress UI because we know that for so long, much of the interface in the back end—when you log into WordPress, specifically to manage your Woo areas—that experience traditionally has had the classic theme approach, or the classic editor approach, much longer than the rest of WordPress has. So they’ve been moving towards blocks progressively, and it looks to me like they’re hitting that tipping point of really being able to ramp up with that.

Jonathan:
I think it was Dan, the head of design. One of the things that stood out to me was this idea that their goal is simple but ambitious. They’re trying to take what is otherwise complex e-commerce operations and make it effortless. Within the context of WordPress, this is one of the things I’ve appreciated from the beginning. WooCommerce has been looking ahead to see where it’s going, and it hasn’t been easy. The editor has been a moving target. There’s been a lot going on there, and it’s required significant upfront investment and patience, I’m sure, on the part of the Woo team. WooCommerce, from the outset, has always been one of the more complex use cases by the nature of what it is—e-commerce within WordPress—where people are going to be using it day in and day out. It’s the heart of a business for many people using it.

Courtney:
Yeah, I think along with that UI/UX refresh, seeing some of the feedback loops they want to get from the community also stands out to me a good bit because it tells me that they’re starting to listen to the users of the product. They really emphasize that they want this to be brand-recognized in terms of people selecting it as their e-commerce platform of choice, knowing that WordPress is under it, but that it stands out as the e-commerce solution for folks to pick from. If they’re going to do that, they certainly need the feedback of where the community is going. I just had some conversation earlier today. I’ve been in the Woo Slack for several years, at least myself, and there were some people that didn’t know that there was a designated WooCommerce Slack.

Jonathan:
Right.

Courtney:
At all. So I think we saw some of that come out, that people are becoming more aware that, oh, I could go participate in the WooCommerce Slack workspace, an entirely additional workspace that has lots and lots of channels in it. I could participate in that area. Remember again, Woo itself is an open-source product. Of course, Automattic is staffing it, and it is different than WordPress.org, where we might “do the Woo hat” as all things open source discussing open source way on Do the Woo. Woo is a commercially backed open-source project, whereas WordPress is seen as a community-backed WordPress project. So it started out not with a business driving it from the outset.

Jonathan:
Correct. Yep. So that’s different about Woo in terms of Automattic. They have lots of things in their marketplace, and we can dig into some of those soon, too. But I think this feedback loop becomes really interesting in that case, as we have a commercial entity backing it with the Slack and seeking out more feedback from the community through GitHub discussions, etc. It is an open-source project, folks. So our opinions really do matter in open source, and if we could go do pull requests on it, if we’d like.

Jonathan:
Something that actually surprised me a bit—I’m curious to hear your thoughts on it. So Tamra, their Chief Marketing Officer, opened up with this idea that they’re embarking on a mission to make Woo a household name. So I was happy to hear that. I like hearing ambition, and you can see that they want to make sure the brand is there. If I’m going out, I’ll tend to wear either my WordPress shirt or my Woo shirt, and every now and then, I do get someone who will recognize the logo. I’ve had it happen a couple of times with Woo, but this surprised me a bit. I like seeing it. I like that Woo is thinking that way. But what do you think about that idea, Courtney, of trying to become a household name? There are numbers there to back that up, right? I think it was 35% or something of e-commerce stores. But the idea of it becoming known as a brand—what do you think about that?

Courtney:
Tricky. If I go shopping—I live in a city called Chambersburg, and I’m close to Gettysburg. So if I go to my local downtown stores, every first Friday of the month, they have this First Friday event. If I go into a bunch of stores and I talk to them about their e-commerce solution, I get a mixture of things. Toast is pretty popular for “order online, go pick up your delivery” kind of place for the food

people. At the farmers market, it’s a lot of Square, where they’re using Square as their mobile processing. You start seeing devices related to that. A couple of WooCommerce folks I follow were pontificating, if you will, on Twitter about a point-of-sale system, and I think that’s where you get some of the branding. But also, if it’s not going directly through Automattic, if you’re using WooCommerce and other options, you’re not necessarily going to pick that point-of-sale system.

Jonathan:
For instance, where I’m employed at GoDaddy, we have our own point-of-sale system, but you could certainly use WooCommerce with that point-of-sale system, and we have our own payment processing. So it becomes nuanced in terms of brand recognition, or is it that you’re selling the features? I just have some thinking, I guess, I want to do on some of that, right?

Jonathan:
I wonder too, is it household name for merchants, or is it a consumer brand? It can be a mix of both, but I’m happy to see the ambition. I’m curious to see how that gets backed up in the coming years.

Courtney:
And if it’s done in an open-source mechanism, I’m curious to see where pushbacks will be. And I’m also curious to see where collaboration will win the day.

Jonathan:
So I had the chance to interview Beau about a month or so ago…

Courtney:
And?

Jonathan:
…just looking at talking about the product broadly. We went into some technical things. I’ve been really happy to see the focus from WooCommerce on becoming more holistic, thinking about the experience, and thinking about integrations. They just recently added a “business services” category to the marketplace, which was like… we’ve known for a long time, and this is something I’ve appreciated about what you guys have done at GoDaddy. You have to think about the holistic experience—what are all the things that someone needs? So that’s been great to see Woo doing that. They’ve got a strong partnerships team. That’s something they’ve been working at for a long time, and it takes a long time to move such a big ecosystem. It’s something we got into with Beau. What was that feature? The database? I’m forgetting… HP high avail—I forget what it was called, but…

Brian:
Thank you, Brian—the HPOS. And it was an important change to improve the scalability of the order tables, etc. You can’t just introduce something like that; you have to do it carefully. You have to get feedback. It was great to hear Beau talking about that and just see today that they’re doubling down on this—thinking holistically, thinking about developers, expanding to get more feedback from agencies, and just thinking about the ecosystem as a whole. I think that bodes well for the future of Woo.

Courtney:
Yes, I think overall, I’ve seen a lot of similar things as well, even inside of WordPress.org. I took part in some of those kinds of conversations when I was at WordCamp US. I’m excited to see the same things happening in Woo as well because our two platforms are… well, one depends upon the other for sure.

So it’s good to see that there’s room for the community as a whole to provide what that feedback is and looks like. It will be interesting to see if that helps Woo. It could do a lot. It is so versatile. It will also be interesting to see if out of this comes a… I need a simplified, you need to slim down for some folks; that’s what they need. And then others that are doing some ridiculous omnichannel marketing—big word if so, omnichannel marketing. I learned when I joined GoDaddy, it means more than just this, but my simplified explanation is you might be selling in person at your brick-and-mortar, you might be selling, “come in, pick it up,” you might be selling mail order, you might be selling TikTok shop as we saw in one of the other sessions, or Pinterest, or Etsy, whatever. Etsy maybe not so much, but you have all of these outposts where you could be selling your items. And if you’ve got the inventory in one single solution database and you’re running your commerce all through that system, that makes it easy. But wow, is that versatile, and wow, is that really complex for somebody that might just need something simple. So I’ll be interested to see if… how the market research shows product path forward.

Jonathan:
One of the things I find interesting, I spend a decent amount of time talking with folks at businesses that are coming into the WordPress space, and WooCommerce tends to be generally high-interest business-oriented. So I’ll be one of the first to help explain to them how the ecosystem works and how to think about it. And it’s quite interesting when it comes down to trying to explain to someone who doesn’t know the space. Because if you’re used to working with a proprietary platform, for instance, it’s pretty straightforward. You want to go do business on Shopify, you talk to the Shopify partnership team, and you’re rock and roll. With WooCommerce, they’ve got a great partnerships team. If you work with them, you’re still limited. It’s not automatic access to the entire Woo ecosystem. You have to opt in, for instance, to get communications from Woo. And this is, I think, an especially important part of it: your WooCommerce onboarding experience can vary quite a bit from one hosting provider to the next. And that’s actually, I think, quite important because hosts in particular are in such a great spot to create curated experiences.

That really cater to the customers that they’re bringing into the space, which can vary quite a bit from one market to the next, which speaks to the versatility of WooCommerce and also the challenge of trying to create a one-size-fits-all and why it’s so important to work with the ecosystem. So I’ve been really happy to see Woo going in more and more in that direction, the trying different things, because I think work that you guys do at GoDaddy, for instance, is just as important to the success of the ecosystem as a whole. And the merchants that you’re bringing on board, many of whom may not have even heard of Woo to begin with because it’s not the household name yet.

Courtney:
Right, yes. And I think that there’s room for that to happen. I think it’s going to have to happen in conjunction with marketing WordPress, and that’s an entirely bigger set of issues because do you think Woo needs WordPress too? If somebody says, “Okay, I’m going to go get a Woo website,” well, they’re going to find out in that process of getting set up that they need WordPress to be there.

Jonathan:
I’m interested, Courtney, to see how that plays out. Back in my time at Woo, I was actually surprised to see that WooCommerce, because of the e-commerce context, was actually driving some WordPress growth. Whereas you’re right, that’s what would happen. They’d say, “I want Woo.” Oh, okay, sure, whatever that means. Which is why they then rely on a host who will give them a good onboarding experience to get there. But that’s something I hadn’t seen much. WooCommerce was the first time I began to tangibly observe WordPress growing because of the demand for one of its sub-ecosystems.

Jonathan:
…don’t know how much that scales, but that was something I hadn’t observed previously, where I was seeing people show up to WooCommerce meetups who had never heard of WordPress but were interested in open-source e-commerce. They’re looking for alternatives to the proprietary platforms that weren’t quite meeting their needs.

Courtney:
Yeah, I thought it interesting, kind of related to that. We saw both Automattic for Agencies and Automattic Affiliate Programs, which is just…

Jonathan:
…separate programs.

Courtney:
Yes. So Automattic for Agencies is specifically, it looks to me, like using WooCommerce, but having an Automattic host environment for that, which makes sense. And there are certainly absolutely use cases for that. I think that there are plenty of fish in the pond, as it were. And though I work for one hosting agency, I think that there is certainly room to grow for having agency partnerships. Pretty much every host that’s out there should have that. It’s interesting to just be aware that they’re specifically thinking about WooCommerce and agencies and having a specific program for that. We heard a little bit about that, and they did clarify that the affiliate program is separate from that, as you will. So it was thinking through what the marketplace needs in terms of e-commerce options and how places are going to make that available. Certainly, I think Automattic was standing out with having a couple of programs already out of the gate.

Jonathan:
Something I didn’t catch anything about yet is how Woo is currently thinking about the enterprise.

Courtney:
I

Jonathan:
…know that they have this enterprise landing page, I know there’ve been efforts there. And one thing that’s interesting to me is, on the one hand, it doesn’t make sense; obviously, Woo is a small business-focused solution. But one of the things I’ve found to be true is that there’s something—if you can give people confidence that you can grow with them, that increases the likelihood that they’ll make that early decision. Because Shopify, for instance, has enterprise. You know that you can go from here all the way up. So I know Woo’s making some progress there. I’d like to see more. But that’s…

Courtney:
Same thing with all the hosts that are offering that. I think it’s important to recognize what we’ve seen in Shopify is quite an exorbitant jump when you are small fish to big fish. And that middle ground, it scales performance-wise well, but budget-wise is a different picture. So I think that Woo can stand to win, whether it be Automattic’s programs specifically or on any host. Hosts can make it possible for it to scale in that medium section where it does not become financially a burden until you reach a certain threshold.

Jonathan:
Speaking of hosts—and we can come back to the state of the Woo in a moment—but speaking of hosts, I actually really enjoyed Dave’s session talking about what Bluehost has been working on. I thought it would be interesting, but it was more interesting than I thought it would be. I liked the idea of telling a story and then just showing the work that they’ve been doing to use blocks and patterns. Yeah, it’s good stuff. Cream, I was happy to see that.

Courtney:
Ice cream, yes.

Jonathan:
Ice cream will keep my attention. Dave Ryan, thank you for sharing about ice cream.

Courtney:
I know Dave kind of wild, so thank you for sharing all about the ice cream. You held my attention.

Jonathan:
I know, I know. Especially in the afternoons, just a little pick-me-up. But yes, I think that the narrative—a lot of what Dave was sharing was through Wonder Blocks, which he was sharing a good bit about the patterns that they already have available through Wonder Suite, which is at Bluehost/New Fold, and they have an entire pattern library ready to go within that offering in particular, making it easy for the business owner that may not need the developer to go set all the pages up but the business owner to go in and say, “I need a new flavor listed,” or “I need this added,” or something like that. Giving the tools to people when they are maintaining their content primarily—not so much the overall design, but that piece—the story really there felt to me like we’re drilling in on, how do we make it easier for someone to list, “I’ve got a new product”? And to then see how that’s getting connected into Woo is going to be, I think, taking the learning curve off of small business owners. Frankly, it’s what we need. Small business owners need to run their business.

Jonathan:
Especially at this stage. I’m all in and quite optimistic about the future of the editor, the blocks, and the full site editor. It’s also challenging to work with, especially if you’re new to it or if you’re coming from an older way of doing things and trying to figure out how template parts work and patterns. It takes effort, like what we’re seeing with Bluehost, to abstract that away. Because a small business owner—some may really want to figure that stuff out, but others, they just want something that works. And for WordPress and WooCommerce to be competitive, there needs to be more and more emphasis on just getting them to success as quickly as possible. And I think hosts are in a great spot to be that champion of getting them to success. There’s aligned interest there, and it also requires working closely with, okay, where’s WooCommerce the platform going? So it’s a lot of moving parts, and it was nice to see a demonstration of a team that’s been working on pulling that together.

Courtney:
Absolutely. Yeah. I also—I did manage to catch the TikTok session as well. There was a specific section just about TikTok and using it. She did take some time in her presentation to show how TikTok itself works. I am definitely guilty of buying things from the TikTok shop. Jonathan, have you made purchases from TikTok yet?

Jonathan:
I have not. I had been curious about it, though, and one of the things I was curious about… I haven’t actually played with the—I know that there’s a WooCommerce integration with TikTok as well, which is great to see. What’s your experience been like?

Courtney:
So I think it was WordCamp US. When we were in DC a year ago, Robert Windish and I were chatting. Lots of people in the community know Robert. Robert is known for wearing the neon green shirt that says “Now Side” (or it used to say “Inside” in it) but also the straw hat with the buttons on it.

Jonathan:
Yes, all the buttons.

Courtney:
If you’ve never met Robert, you still probably have seen a picture of him somewhere. So Robert and I were talking, and he said…

Jonathan:
He’s practically a household name.

Courtney:
He really is. You should request his autograph. So Robert was talking to me about, what’s the biggest competitor to WordPress? And immediately I said, “Oh, it’s TikTok or apps.” Oh wow. Because I had just purchased a pair of jeans after scrolling through TikTok, as one does. Now my guilty pleasure is videos from Morton Rand Hendrickson of hippos eating pumpkins—since we’re at that time of the year—like zoo animals destroying pumpkins. It’s really great after you’ve had a hard day; it’s like, that’s where I go with my TikTok. But they show me ads, and I needed to buy jeans, so I got jeans before WordCamp US. And I say that it is the competitor to WordPress, more so than these other platforms like Shopify, etc., because of the mobile-first nature of it and how it’s functioning. But what if you also want to target people outside of just the TikTok app?

So omnichannel marketing kicks in, where you could have your centralized database of inventory and sales and all of that, keep all your records. It makes it easier when you could unify that experience instead of having to deliver… There’s a boutique in my city that sells clothes in person, and their mobile app sends me push alerts to come buy this thing, whatever. Unifying that entire experience is interesting. And by just dropping in the bits that TikTok tells you you need—certainly, if you’re going to do ad targeting with it, you’re going to get a pixel. But if you want to go down the route of hooking it up to your Woo store and all of that, you could go down that route too. So I think it’s worthwhile. I would like to see maybe a little bit like a level-two version of that information in the future.

Jonathan:
I’ve liked this idea of WooCommerce serving as… and open source in general—when I think about WordPress serving as the central hub that you own. Because it’s not like… when I’m talking to folks about it, it’s like, I’m all for the proprietary platforms. They have their place if you can reach your customers through there. But at the end of the day, I don’t want to see someone build their entire business on just one platform, especially when there’s an open-source, like, foundation that you could choose to build on and then connect those different players with. Because you don’t know what’s going to come or go, or how things are going to work. By all means, make the most of what platforms like TikTok have to offer. And it’s great to see them investing in this space—love seeing that—and doing so within the context of something that’s yours, which is what open source gives you, I think, as a stronger foundation on which to build a business. But it’s not obvious to folks. And for small businesses who are just getting started, too, they want to just get something that works, which is why we, as an ecosystem, need to make it more and more accessible. I feel like we’re going in the right direction; we’ve just got…

Courtney:
Yeah, the word “accessibility” was actually used quite a bit in the state of Woo talk as well. I am curious if we’re talking accessibility like “many people can access this thing,” or if we are talking accessibility from a user accessibility perspective. Hopefully both.

Jonathan:
Yes.

Courtney:
And that should be, hopefully, both—from a logged-in experience as well, not just front of site. Yeah, it was definitely good to hear a lot of that kind of conversation going on. Were there any other areas that really stood out to you, Jonathan, through some of the other sessions? I think you got to one or two that I didn’t get to.

Jonathan:
I caught the beginning of Termageddon. So, Brian did a great introduction. I’m a big fan of Termageddon and what they’ve done in the space generally, and I’m really happy to see that being applied to e-commerce. There’s more folks now who are also worried about, speaking of accessibility, like lawsuits and “Am I going to be covered with all this?” It can be pretty intimidating, especially for a small business owner. And on the bigger platforms, proprietary… “bigger” is actually not an accurate thing to say because of just how huge Woo is. These proprietary platforms may have out-of-the-box baked-in solutions. In our space, folks like Edon are essential. They’ve been doing great work to deal with figuring out, okay, what are the requirements? What do you need to do? So I was happy to see that. And it’s important because it is something that’s probably not the first thing that a merchant is thinking—”Okay, I got to get all this stuff worked out and get my privacy stuff in place.” That’s not a top of mind for a typical entrepreneur. And yet, if you’re going to be serious in e-commerce, you do have to think about those things. So I was happy to see that.

Courtney:
That’s an area where I think that continuing to work with developers, even if you’re slightly tech-savvy as a user enough to set up your own simple version of a Woo store, I think that you’ll still miss some of those key areas that are vital to work with a professional about. Oh, do you know that you need to have some kind of terms and policies, and how do you go about getting that aside from just getting the store set up and working as well? I certainly think that people would be covered that are working at a large scale. If they’re a very large organization, they’re going to already have jumped through some of those hoops.

Jonathan:
So, Courtney, I’m curious… Brian and his team have been doing this successfully for several years now. I like that you’re looking to the future. That’s great. And that’s actually where I wanted to go with this. So, seven years—congratulations for that and really appreciate it. And to me, this is such a great example of a collaboration as well. WooCommerce has worked closely with you to do this. It’s been great to see WooCon continuing to grow and seeing the range of what you guys have done. Courtney, as we look ahead to this next year and anticipate the next state of the Woo, what are some of the things that you’re looking forward to? Any hopes or things that you want to see more of, less of?

Courtney:
Yeah, I want to see a lot more of the data on the findings from when they’re doing market research. I think that that would be really interesting to see some of the market research—what they can show us. In WordPress, we’ve had the annual survey.

Brian:
…Having something that is published like that. Case studies were also mentioned in the state of the Woo. I think having a lot more case studies that depict different sizes and scales would be really compelling because, again, you might have someone that’s selling just some online digital product that’s a single one-off, and that’s it. And you might have somebody that is doing ridiculous omnichannel and selling on all the platforms and has very different use cases for that. I would love to see that. I am interested to see where the mobile app goes in conjunction also with the WordPress mobile app, but what that could do to power small business owners. What would the implementation and the use case of that look like and really leaning into… I mean, I know I’m saying omnichannel marketing a lot. Thank Beka Rice for that one, but…

Jonathan:
…Thank you, Beca.

Courtney:
I think continuing down that path of, how do we stitch together all of these different outposts and do it in a way that continues to be not overwhelming as businesses grow.

Jonathan:
Yes.

Courtney:
Right. When you’re at a really large scale, well, it’s going to be overwhelming, and that’s why you have…

Jonathan:
…You’re going to have a team for that, but early on…

Courtney:
…It’s going to be so overwhelming just dealing with all the… I don’t know how to…

Jonathan:
Complete, oh, now.

Courtney:
Yeah, exactly. So I think I would like to see a little bit more about how we guide folks into learning, “What do I need? What’s my next step?” That’s what I would like to see. How about you?

Jonathan:
Brian, I’m going to put you on the spot for a moment shortly here to answer the same question, but I’ll start and give you time to think about it. I really like the increased focus on the ecosystem that we’re seeing from the team at Woo. There’s always been parts of that they’ve done well and various attempts over the years, and I love seeing that they’re thinking more holistically about both the experience that people are having at Woo and how that entry plays with the marketplace. If I’m recalling correctly, I think they’re up to 900 extensions. There’s a lot of growth there, and there are many challenging things that come with managing and supporting an ecosystem. I see the effort on the part of the WooCommerce team and a lot of folks who are clearly passionate about doing it well. And in this next year, I’m hoping to see even more emphasis on the ecosystem holistically and the role that they can play in really helping it grow.

How do they bring more emphasis to their partners? How do they make it easier for businesses to come in, invest in this space, and reach customers? How do they strengthen the relationships they’ve got with the hosting providers, each in a great spot to create great experiences for Woo that are focused on those particular markets? If Woo tries to do it all, they’re not going to be able to, and you’re not playing to the strengths of being in the decentralized space. Brian, you’ve got seven years. You’ve been able to see a lot of things as WooCommerce has been growing over this period of time. What are some things that you’re looking forward to in the next year?

Brian:
So I’ve got two answers for this. First, I am a simple man who likes simple things. My favorite thing is things that are designed well. And so, I’m not going to lie—the focus on changing the brand identity really got me excited. I love branding changes that are done well, and the logo mark looks so simple and obvious, which is how it took forever—so many iterations to land on—because the simple and obvious design takes forever to get to the core of what you want to do. So that made me really happy.

Then my second answer is kind of counterintuitive because I don’t… I like the idea of increasing the core of WooCommerce so that it’s solving more common problems. I expect it’s not going to go well initially, and that’s just the nature of trying to increase the size of the pie and do more things. Philosophically, I like a really lean core with extensions to do all of the specialized things you need to do, which is what WooCommerce is based around. It’s kind of what WordPress is based around. We could argue about, does core WordPress need to have this feature or shouldn’t it? Somewhere there’s a nice happy medium of giving core more of the most commonly used features that don’t require a ton more maintenance and overhead, while still leaving things out there.

I expect the team—and us as a community providing feedback and contributing code, etc.—are going to collectively land in the right spot, but I think it’s going to be probably an uncomfortable transition initially. Much like the transition to the block editor in WordPress, right? When this was first announced on stage, I’m like, “This is going to be a fantastic idea.” And for years I’m like, “But not yet. But not yet. But not yet.” And then finally this year, thanks to the stuff that was put in last year, I’m like, “Ah, this is it.” I couldn’t quite articulate what it was that I was waiting for. Turns out it was a more consistent user interface but also reusable patterns.

So the pattern library and this was also an uncomfortable transition—from reusable blocks to patterns. I’m like, “Okay, finally we’ve arrived at the paradigm that I think is the tipping point for this being like, obviously, you wouldn’t want to do it differently than this.” You mentioned Dave’s beautiful case study/product demo that encapsulates it beautifully because a product, effectively, that Bluehost has, which is Wonder Blocks… but their secret sauce isn’t that they’ve come up with a new paradigm of doing things. It’s just like, “We have competent designers on staff who can design compelling patterns, largely using the blocks that everybody has at their disposal.” And so the advantage they offer you is time saved and consistency of experience because you can incorporate their patterns with other things you’re doing.

It’s a very long way of saying I’m pretty sure we’re going to arrive at a destination that is as comfortable for WooCommerce core because of the plan to increase the core of WooCommerce, but I think it’s going to be weird for a year or two as we eventually land there.

Jonathan:
Well, this takes us to the end of day one. You’ve got an entire day coming up tomorrow. How are you feeling about tomorrow, Brian?

Brian:
I feel pretty excited about tomorrow, honestly. It’s always hard to decide in a two-day event (last year it was three days) which talk belongs where, and sometimes it organically works out. In the first couple of years of WooSesh, it was very much day one is for store owners and store builders, and day two is for developers and agency owners. And then, as time went on, the things that each of those groups needed to hear… they kind of both needed to hear. And so it kind of got blended. So I still tend to put the more technical talks on day two, but more often it’s cross-threaded. A good example: today we got to hear, you already talked about, implementing privacy when Don was talking about how critical it is to get privacy controls correct. The site owner needs to know that because they’re liable, but the people building the sites—the developers, the agency owners—also need to understand how that works so that they aren’t setting their clients up for failure. And so more and more, this is another long-winded answer, my talks that are across days one and two end up being largely for everybody. And so it was hard to decide, “Does this make more sense in this group on day one or in this group on day two?”

Jonathan:
Well, we appreciate the effort you’ve been putting into it. We’ve now got seven years down…

Brian:
And…

Jonathan:
…Do the Woo. We’ll be back tomorrow; this time, it’ll be Marcus and Robbie who’ll be doing the recap at the end. Brian, thanks so much for having us. Thanks for all that you’ve been doing.

Brian:
Absolutely.

Jonathan:
It’s been fantastic. Keep it up, and we’re looking forward to the next.

Brian:
My pleasure.